


All Indicators Green

by Penknife



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Character Who Is Obviously Not Fine Actually Admits They Are Maybe Not Fine, Hand & Finger Kink, M/M, Resolved Sexual Tension, Stoic Character Isn't Quite Hiding Their Problems, Trapped in Spaceship Escape Pod Together, wireplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:53:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21708523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Penknife/pseuds/Penknife
Summary: Cassian is fine after Scarif.
Relationships: Cassian Andor/K-2SO
Comments: 17
Kudos: 79
Collections: Writing Rainbow Green





	All Indicators Green

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nununununu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nununununu/gifts).



Cassian is fine after Scarif.

His team survived the mission, and if he can see, behind his eyes when he closes them, a dozen ways for each of them to die, none of those things happened, so it's fine. He spends a while limping around the base, because bacta can only do so much. The Death Star mission goes off without any of them, and is a tremendous if bloody success. They're doing so well.

Jyn gets assigned to a field team, and Bodhi to a ship. Baze and Chirrut are going to go try to find some of the Guardians who fled Jedha before the end. Cassian and K-2SO are assigned to a mission that might be intended as an easy run, a pickup from an information source aboard a passenger liner. It doesn't really require Cassian's particular skills, but he accepts that he still walks with a slight limp, and isn't back to one hundred percent efficiency.

"I'm fine," he says to K-2, who is infuriatingly skeptical about his ability to carry out the mission.

"I don't like the way you're acting."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Cassian says. If he surrendered to nerves after every near miss, he'd have been out of action long ago. The fact that their deaths seem so vivid— _Chirrut would be calm, and Baze would be determined, and Bodhi would be brave, and Jyn would keep fighting to the very last, and K-2_ — "You're the one who's acting nervy."

"You know I don't have nerves."

"You have learned responses. You nearly got killed last time we went out. If your responses are off, I could maybe adjust something to fix it."

"What can I adjust to fix you?"

"It's not like I'm an amateur," Cassian says. "We nearly got killed, we got the information, the planet blew up but we weren't on it, it's all in a day's work."

"Good. Then you'll sleep on the ship."

"Of course I'll sleep on the ship," Cassian says.

He doesn't sleep on the ship. He's too aware that the door is only locked with a civilian-grade lock, and that it's possible that this rendezvous, scheduled for the following day, is a trap designed to cash in on the staggering price on their heads. He paces their cabin until K-2 says, "I still think you're malfunctioning."

"Humans don't have malfunctions, Kay, they—look, I'm sleeping," he says, and lies down. His heart is racing, and all he can see when he closes his eyes is way after way that this could go wrong. Most of them are ways that someone could take down K-2 before Cassian can stop them. He can hear the splintering metal and smell the ozone. He tosses and turns and finally climbs out of bed and splashes water on his face in the fresher. It's time to start a new day.

The fact that he hasn't slept doesn't actually make the meeting with his contact go worse, because it is already completely kriffed at the point where Cassian arrives, catches sight of the man he is there to meet, and then watches the man dropped by a blaster bolt. Cassian shoots back in the general direction of the fire, and then alarms go off indicating that the liner is under attack, and everything becomes far more chaotic than he wanted.

By the time they're in an escape pod, he's established that the assailants aren't Imperial or bounty hunters, but seem to be pirates seizing on the opportunity to grab information that might be salable on the open market. They might be working for one of the syndicates, or might be on their own. It's hard to analyze their motives when they're heavily armed and trigger-happy, and so Cassian crams himself and K-2 into an escape pod, deploys the sensor jammer that will hopefully keep them from being scooped up by the pirate frigate the moment they launch, and slams down the lever to launch the pod.

The advantage of abandoning a passenger liner is that they're on a major hyperspace route, and indeed near enough to the moon of a nearby system to land the pod, after a while of watching the stars spin dizzyingly. There will be other survivors. There will be a search. They will inevitably be rescued. This is, therefore, fine.

The atmosphere is acceptable enough to vent the pod. They have water and emergency rations. The temperature outside is too cold to venture out, but the pod's power supply will keep them warm enough. All indicators are green.

"Good," Cassian says, once he's satisfied himself of that. "This could have gone worse, all things considered."

"There was a thirteen percent chance of your death, and a twenty-seven percent chance that I would be permanently destroyed," K-2 says.

"Can you tell me why you think I want to know that?" Cassian asks. "I'm curious."

"We've been in a lot more trouble than that."

"Constantly," Cassian says. He shifts his weight. It's hard to get comfortable in the escape pod when he can't, quite, stretch his bad leg. He twists restlessly and decides he would be more comfortable next to K-2, where K-2's legs wouldn't be in his way. He suits actions to words until they are, more or less, huddling together, to the extent that K-2 is capable of huddling.

"Your heart rate is above normal parameters for optimum functioning," K-2 points out. "I don't think I'm the one who's nervy."

"We're trapped in a pod on a freezing cold planet after people shot at us," Cassian says.

"You don't usually mind."

Cassian puts his head in his hands. It's possible that he doesn't, in fact, usually mind. It's also possible that he has somehow saved up the extent to which he does mind for some later date when he can mind things thoroughly and at great length. This is not that day, he tells himself. This is another day where it's important that he thrive on near-death experiences.

"The chance of you being destroyed shouldn't be higher than the chance of me getting killed," Cassian says after a while. "You're working from bad data."

"There are numerous scenarios in which I could prevent your death by sacrificing myself. That is one of the reasons you take me on these missions."

"I take you on these missions because I need backup. And there are scenarios in which I could prevent you from being destroyed by getting killed. Are you figuring those into your calculations?"

"That would require breaking Alliance protocols regarding the relative importance of personnel and equipment."

"And I would never break the rules, right?" He doesn't even touch "equipment." Under other circumstances K-2 would be the first one to argue that he isn't equipment.

"I was right. You're acting irrationally."

"I'm acting like a person who actually has feelings. It's probably very wrong of me. But I'm not going to let you die if I can help it."

"Why?" K-2 asks after a while, and Cassian breathes a humorless laugh.

"Because—" He's beginning to concede that there might, in fact, be something wrong with him, because the pictures that have been flashing behind his eyes have somehow turned into a knot that's settled in his throat. "Because I have to have one thing for me."

"I'm not a thing."

"A moment ago you were arguing that you were equipment."

"I don't remember doing that."

"Kay." Cassian rests his head on his knees, and then straightens up to face his infuriating partner. "If we have to die, for the cause, then we die. But you dying for me isn't a solution."

"It's obviously one solution."

"You said you wanted to fix me. If you meant that, tell me that you aren't going to sacrifice yourself for me."

"Even if I'm lying?"

There's more humor in Cassian's laugh that time. "Yes. Even if you're lying."

"I won't sacrifice myself for you."

"You're lying," Cassian says.

"It's important to me that you not die."

"It's possible that we're in the wrong line of work," Cassian says, because ultimately he's not sure he believes in any other end, for either of them.

"I prefer this to the alternatives," K-2 says.

"When you put it that way, so do I," Cassian says. He wouldn't really prefer being ignorant or helpless. He curls in closer to K-2, trying to soak up his warmth. "Is it getting colder in here?"

"No," K-2 says. "You're malfunctioning again."

"That's very possible," Cassian says. It's possible that he is very, very tired. He would like a few days when no one tries to kill his friend.

K-2 drapes a metallic arm around his shoulders. It's heavy, and not conventionally comforting, and still actually comforting. K-2's arms are long enough that it's easy for Cassian to rest his hand on K-2's. Still possessed by whatever demon has prompted this entire conversation, he lets himself take K-2's hand, and then lets himself lift it to his lips and kiss K-2's fingers, and then turn his hand over to kiss his palm. The metal is warm against his lips, and he breathes against it.

"I'm not sure what that means," K-2 says.

"We're both still here," Cassian says.

"Keep doing that, then," K-2 says for a while, and then, "Is this a kind of sex?"

"I'm not sure this qualifies as being all the way to sex," Cassian says. He would like to say he's never thought about the question, but that would be a lie. He feels parts of his body that he hasn't paid much attention to lately beginning to stir to life. "There are things that we could do, hypothetically, that might very well be sex."

"We should do those things."

It's Cassian's turn to ask, "Why?" He wouldn't ask, except that he knows K-2 won't interpret the question as meaning "No."

"Because we're both still here," K-2 says after another lengthy pause. It's enough time for a human to have an entire revelation about sex and love and things that are necessary to his personal happiness. He has no idea what K-2 has been doing with all that processor time. Maybe thinking about the same things. Very possibly thinking about sex.

Cassian raises K-2's hand to his lips again, and then sucks one long finger. That feels considerably more like sex. So does the point at which K-2 twists so that he can get his other hand into Cassian's lap and unfasten Cassian's trousers.

"I'm not sure—how does this work, with you?" Cassian asks.

"I believe this should be sufficient," K-2 says, and wraps his hand around Cassian's cock, which—yes, that does work, especially when K-2's palm begins to vibrate, which sends waves of arousal through him from the base of his spine all the way down his thighs.

"I mean, for you."

"What you're doing works. It's an interesting sensation. There are other things we could try, but I'm busy right now."

Cassian takes that as permission to go on sucking K-2's fingers, which is both like and entirely unlike sucking cock, and to enjoy the thing that K-2 is doing to him. He can't actually remember the last time he did something he wholeheartedly enjoyed. It's possible, actually, that his head hasn't been in a good place for some time, but right now—

The need to come is becoming urgent, and he groans and arches up into K-2's hand and lets it happen. "I want, let me, something," he says, turning to straddle K-2's knee as if they could kiss like humans, as if he could twine their warm bodies together. He can hang on tight, at least, and get as close as he can.

"Here," K-2 says, and brings Cassian's fingers to the seam of his hip. It's possible, there, to dig his fingers in and touch wire. He's not sure how to tell which are the right wires, but K-2 moves his hand, and then makes a humming noise that he hopes is pleasure.

He works his fingers there, and rubs idly against K-2's leg, because he's getting hard again, and it's possible that he could actually get off again despite fatigue and the way his leg is starting to cramp and the ridiculousness of this situation. He wants so much, and it's so rare for him to be able to get what he wants.

Eventually he feels K-2 shake under him, an arrhythmic vibration through every limb, and takes it as a signal to do more of what he's doing. There's an electrical crackle across his fingertips, a brightening of K-2's eyes, and then he feels K-2 relax under him. He can't relax himself, too close to the edge.

"Your hand," he says, and thankfully K-2 understands what he wants, and curls his hand for Cassian to thrust into. It's nothing he should be doing, and everything he needs.

He comes again, a wrenching peak, and clings to K-2, sweaty and trembling with fatigue.

"You are still here," K-2 says, as if there were some doubt.

"I am. I think I'm very tired," Cassian says, and it's something of a new thought that he actually, badly, would like to sleep. He twists so that he can curl up on the escape pod seat and pillow his arm on K-2's thigh.

"Sleep is not a malfunction," K-2 says.

"So you say," Cassian says, but he lets himself close his eyes.


End file.
